I'm starting a new project involving JBoss and Hibernate, among other things. I've never used either before. I see that both have Eclipse plug-ins called Hibernate Tools.

These seem to be related, as the JBoss Eclipse IDE has links to the Hibernate Tools on hibernate.org. But the JBoss Eclipse IDE also has a download for a file called:

JBossIDE-1.5M1-Hibernate-Tools.zip
which is 18260 KB

whereas hibernate.org has a download for:

hibernate-tools-3.0alpha1.zip
which is 8031 KB

so clearly these plug-ins are substantially different.

versions:
JBoss 4.0.2
Eclipse 3.0.2
Hibernate 3.0.5

Can anyone clarify what the differences are and recommend one or the other ?

Thanks,
Charlie

Hibernate tools package include just that, eg, code generaters and wizards, editors specific for hibernate. JBoss IDE is bundling the hibernate tools with many of its own plugins which add include easy application server management, Xdoclet helpers and many other features. Currently, JBossIDE has a later version of the tools build than alpha 1 but last night I was testing/playing with Max's latest build which available be out soon.